School teachers

Recently I found an old list of my school teachers and the Danvers schools I attended. It is not complete, but it did add a few details I had not remembered. Using those clues and my memory, I can quickly construct this list:

1st grade:  Mrs. Billings at the Hathorne School.  1949/50

2nd grade: Tapley Street School

3rd grade:  Mrs. Billings again (but at a different school, between Charter Street and Maple Street)

4th grade:  Mrs. Oliver at the newly-built Great Oak Elementary School

5th grade:  [a classroom in Richmond Junior High School]

6th grade: Mrs. Sears in a classroom in Richmond Junior High School

7th grade: Richmond Junior High School

8th grade: Mr. Corbeil, Richmond Junior High School

For 9th and 10th grade I attended Holten High School (next door to Richmond Jr. High).

I definitely remember that I attended five (5) different schools in my first five years of school! The Danvers school population was growing rapidly (because of the post-WWII baby boom), and the school district no doubt had many challenges in finding sufficient classroom space.

I've written previously about walking to the one-room Hathorne School, and about taxi and bus rides to the other schools. The expansion of Route 1 forced the removal of the Hathorne School at the close of the 1949/50 school year.

By the 1953/54 school year (my fifth grade), note the overflow of some elementary classes into the Junior High building. For six years I was bused to classes at the same location: that Richmond/Holton campus. It would have been eight years, had I stayed in public school.

I left Danvers schools after 10th grade (1958/59).  I'll explain why in my next post.

Heifers

Photos in this morning's local paper* showed 7-month old heifers running in a pasture for the first time. The accompanying article said, "...they jumped from the trailer into the pasture where they will be spending the next few months."

Oh, how I remember watching Mr. Hooper's heifers leap from the back of his truck when he brought them from his Danvers dairy farm to the Locust Lawn property near my home. At Locust Lawn they would have acres of fields and woods in which to roam. Probably they had been cooped up in a barn all winter.

They arrived packed side by side in the truck, with no room to maneuver. Mr. Hooper parked the truck on the old dirt road just south of the big barn at Locust Lawn. He opened the wide gate to the pasture, which sloped down towards the east, beside the ski slope.  Then he lifted the back panels out of his truck and prepared to position ramps for those young cows to walk down from the truck bed.

Well! The heifers didn't wait for a ramp. Some leapt sideways into the air, and hit the ground running!  They seemed to jump for joy. They cavoted around in the free space, and ran off in various directions.

What fun to watch this ritual of Spring! 

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* See the Daily Hampshire Gazette, May 13, 2020,  "Who Let the Cows Out?" online (with video of the heifers) at
 https://www.gazettenet.com/Barstow-Farm-in-Hadley-releases-several-cows-on-Pasture-Day-34283329

Mother's Day

Dogwood trees always make me think of my mother. She LOVED dogwood trees and their blossoms.

On a walk this morning in Holyoke, I photographed these lovely examples.

Dogwoods bloom in early May -- around the date of my mother's birthday (May 5). Mommy would take us to her home town of Westport, Connecticut, and show us streets lined with flowering dogwoods. On some streets the dogwoods were so huge that they towered over the roadway, connecting into a continuous canopy of pink and white dogwood blossoms.

Younger dogwood trees grew beside our little house in Danvers. I believe that she had transplanted them from Westport sometime in the early 1940's.

Happy Mother's Day! 

Remembering Janet Cutler Nichols (1912-1976).